Alex Heberling

My Lulu bookstore is online.  I’ve spent the past two weeks or so preparing my material for printing, and at this point, almost my entire body of work is available for purchase.  It’s been rather satisfying seeing all of it laid out like this, and I’m glad I finally got this daunting task done.

My main concern with this method of publishing is the cost.  The downside to being a full-color graphic novelist is that printing costs go through the roof with a print-on-demand service like Lulu.  The entire first Volume of Garanos, with all 172 pages, is going to cost $40 just to print, so once I put in my markup and Lulu takes their cut, it’s probably going to be about $50, and I’ll get approximately eight dollars out of it.  I hope that my readers can understand that I’m making the prices as low as possible while still getting a few dollars from each copy for myself.

The main reason I’m doing this is for my final show, since my plan is to have printed copies of all my comics there for people to read.  I’d like to have a bookshelf of them, all set up, with possibly a table and laptop nearby so people can read them on the web, too.  It’s going to cost a pretty penny, since I’m buying multiple copies of everything, but it’ll be worth it.

According to my calculations, I’ve done about 550 pages in my webcomic career (Jigworthy to present) and almost half of those were done just in 2008.  That’s a hell of a lot of work, and I never thought to sit down and actually figure out the numbers, until I started readying the print files and realized, “Huh.  I’ve done a lot of comics.”

I’ll admit that after almost four years of doing webcomics, I thought I’d be a bit further along than where I am now, in terms of notariety.  However, one good thing about where I am now is that when I do get that big break, I’ll already have this massive body of work to show.  And now that my comics are print-ready, I can actually have more tangible things to show people when I go places like conventions, instead of a business card with a URL which will most likely get lost.  (Not that I’m still sore about Connecticon and the zero exposure all that networking got me or anything.  *laughs nervously*)

Well, I was going to do my third 24HC this past weekend, but decided not to.  It was Halloween weekend, I hadn’t had a weekend home to myself in a couple weeks, I was invited to a party, and I had tons of work to do for school (mostly finishing the Summer’s Year video) so it just seemed to make much more sense to move my next attempt to November 8th.

I’m actually redesigning my 24HC website for my web class, since I didn’t really put a whole lot of effort or thought into the look of the site before smashing it together.  It’ll be a much nicer, slicker design, hopefully with some snazzy Javascript scrolling.  I finished building the site last night, but since my navigation uses a stationary image map, most existing smooth scroll scripts do not work properly.  As Chris explained to me, they are usually scripts that find all anchor links in a page that link to other parts of the same page and apply handlers to them, but since an image map doesn’t use anchors, I need something that looks for HREFs or something like that.  Chris is working on tweaking the script for me, so hopefully it’ll work out before the website is due.

Since it’s November 4th, I feel I have to mention the election.  It’s in fact voting day here in the USA, and in just a few hours we will have a pretty clear indication of who our new president is.  Chris and I voted two weeks ago at the Vets’ Memorial downtown, so we don’t have to stand in line at the polls today.  To show my support, I pinned the Obama/Biden bumper sticker I got for free from MoveOn.org to my bag.  Normally I’m self-conscious when anything about my appearance draws attention to me (such as the time my black earbuds broke and I had to use the white Apple earbuds with my iPod for a few days;  that made me feel extremely awkward) but in the spirit of the election, I’ll take one for the team.

I’ll close with my ‘favorite’ of the horrible, tasteless t-shirts that came up in the last year.  By favorite, I mean I find it funny but do know how exactly terribly unfunny it really is.  (Cringe.)

Bros Before Hos: Obama 08!

I’ve been pretty obsessed with UNIQLOCK lately.  It’s a beautiful piece of web art, designed as viral marketing for UNIQLO, a Japanese clothing line.  Chris initially linked it to me, and the first time I saw it, I was captivated for about ten solid minutes.

The music was done by Tomoyuki Tanaka of Fantastic Plastic Machine, who also made the featured music in the Superflat Monogram Louis Vuitton video; the choregraphy was done by Yuichi Kodama and AIRMAN.

The video clips feature lithe young women with the wardrobe naturally provided by UNIQLO.  Before I knew anything about this work, I figured that it must all have something to do with the clothing, which changes slightly from clip to clip.  There are even several seasons of the clock, in which different sets of UNIQLO’s clothing is featured.

When I first drafted this post last week, the clock had not changed over to the Fall/Winter version, which just started on October 23rd, so instead of the colorful t-shirts, the girls are now in very comfy winter clothes, and from what I’ve watched of it, have changed settings to an airport.  (The image accompanying this post is a screencap from my favorite clip from the library footage.)

Be prepared to sit and stare for awhile if you visit.  Older ’seasons,’ as they are called, can be watched by clicking on the Menu tab on the left side of the screen and selecting the archives.  My favorite scenes from season 3 were of the girls in the library, and whenever the puff balls were edited in with the footage.

I really want a pair of those pleated skorts from season 2, since they look oh-so-comfortable and very cute.  (But I get the feeling that UNIQLO doesn’t do plus-sizes.)

My illustration of Karen is completed!  I’m very happy with how she turned out.  My additional comments can be read at this piece’s deviantART page.

I’ve had some mixed feelings towards coloring lately.  I was getting so burned out on Garanos by the time I started my hiatus that, at that point, I knew I really had to change something to keep such a beautiful comic from becoming a chore.

Thus, I’m trying out some new things.

Most of the comic coloring tutorials put out by the big guns in webcomics are wonderful, but are heavily weighted in the favor of traditionally-inked artwork.  This is unfortunate, as I’ve reiterated in blog posts past, because I dislike inking.

But I’m trying out a new technique nonetheless that I hope I will transfer over to Garanos, and hopefully let me get pages done in a more efficient manner.  The guinea pig I’m using for this is a drawing I did of Karen Filippelli from The Office, played by Rashida Jones.

So far, I’m borrowing a combination of techniques used by Hawk, who does Applegeeks, and Sarah Ellerton, of The Phoenix Requiem.  Unlike what I’ve done before, shading and highlighting is now on separate layers and set to various blending modes, rather than painted directly onto the flat color layer.  First, I made my layer of flats, which are just random colors chosen to identify areas that I want to be separately selectable with the Magic Wand.

This is the part I borrowed mostly from Hawk.  I differentiated parts of Karen’s hair that I’ll want to be colored separately, along with things like her lips, chin and neck, and her eyelids.  All the selections I made as I built this layer are aliased, meaning that there are hard pixel edges, as seen in the closeup.  This is because later, when I use the Magic Wand to select bits, I don’t want there to be gaps where the tolerance setting didn’t pick up aliased edges.

Being an output-minded individual, I’d normally be worried about how aliasing affects the print quality of the image, but at resolutions as high as those that I work in it becomes irrelevant, since the image is shrunk down quite a bit for web presentation.

I duplicated the Flats layer and named it Colors, and with my tolerance set to 0, I used the Fill Bucket to fill in Karen’s actual colors, below.

Since I still have the Flats layer, I don’t need to put things on seperate layers.  Here’s an example of the flats at work, allowing me to select individual parts of the image:

This brought me to the shading and highlights.  These are both on seperate layers set to blending modes Multiply and Screen, respectively.  This is what I have shaded on Karen so far, using my Wacom Bamboo.  Since they’re separate layers, I can also do fun, trippy things with the Flat layer as well.

This is what the Shading and Highlights layers look like by themselves and together, without the Colors or Flats layers.

The shading color is a dark, muted brown from Photoshop’s default swatches, a color I use quite often.  The highlight colors are white by default, but to highlight the lips, for example, I selected Karen’s actual lip color from the Colors layer, which looks nice since the layer is set to screen, and it lightens her lips very softly.

I’m rather intrigued about where this new technique will take me, and how it will influence the evolution of my style.  I will post again when I get her finished!

I’ll preface this by admitting that I read a lot of blogs.  I mean, a lot of blogs.  I don’t watch TV, save for The Office, and I don’t read many books, so much of my entertainment comes from the internet.  Being an artist, good artistic and creative resources are very valuable to me, so I wanted to make a blog entry about the artsy stuff I read online.

BoingBoing: In its own words, it’s a directory of wonderful things.  BB is full of interesting people who find interesting things all over the internet, and they often post about art.  Through them, I’ve found such interesting artists as Terry Border and Eric Poulton.

Animation Backgrounds:  A blog dedicated to reconstructing the painted backdrops from animated features.

Ethan Persoff:  The main draw of Persoff’s site, for me, is Comics With Problems.  CWP is a series of vintage comics that were made to address social and political problems that just seem terribly kitschy today.  One of my favorites is the communism comic.

Heather Castles is a freelance illustrator, and often posts bits of whatever she’s working on.  Her work has been seen in several childrens books and on greeting cards.

Freelance Switch:  Probably the best freelancing blog out there.  This has been a very useful resource for me since I’ll soon be at a point where I’ll need to think about starting an actual business out of what I do, and there are literally hundreds of articles written by experienced freelancers for other freelancers.

Creattica Daily is a side project of Freelance Switch, and is geared towards creative types.  They often post free fonts and news items.

Frugal For Life:  It’s never too early to start shaving down your spending.  It’ll be especially important if I go the route of freelancing, so FFL is a very good resource for that.

Wise Bread is also a great resource for “living large on a small budget”.  They post helpful articles about frugality, personal finance, and lifehacking.

Advanced Style is a blog documenting older folks with great threads.

As Found:  According to the site, its motto is “JPEG till we die.”  The maintainers will post images that they find that have any sort of visual harmony or interest, and often put together online gallery shows of images of a specific type.

Faces in Places:  Exactly how it sounds.  The humanoid faces that pop up in ordinary places.

Knuckle Tatoos:  KT is dedicated exclusively to tattoos on the fingers and knuckles.  The choices people make in their self-expression are fascinating.

So those are just some of the interesting and inspirational blogs I read.

Yet another 24HC blog post.  By the time December rolls around, I’ll be sick of them, I bet.

Tomorrow, October 18th, is 24 Hour Comics Day.  I’ll be attempting another go at it, but this plan is to do it all within the 18th– that is, midnight to midnight.  I’ll be sleeping the evening away to prepare for another marathon.  Hopefully the physical strain wont be as bad this time, since I’ll be making a conscious effort to prevent repetitive motion injuries.  My hand wraps will be close by regardless.

I originally wanted to do this attempt with a group, and I had several friends and acquaintances interested in gathering somewhere, but when it came down to it, I was afraid that the effort needed to organize a hosting party would result in me being unable to actually make a comic.  After going through one attempt on my own, and realizing the work involved in just doing a comic, it didn’t seem feasible to get it all together, especially since I ran out of time to do so rather quickly, due to the nonstop busyness that invaded my life starting September 24th.

On a related note, I’ve been so damned busy with school that the thought of trying to maintain even Garanos right now seems really crazy to me.  I’m really glad I decided to put it on hold.  I’m thinking that when I do continue with Gara next month, I will announce an irregular update schedule until school is over.

I plan on doing the video documentation a bit different this time around, as well.  I felt like I was saying “Okay..” and “So…” way too much even when I was just filming, so I’ll try to be a little more eloquent and ditch the filler words.  And at the suggestion of my peers, who critiqued Pariah last week, I’ll try to get more footage of myself actually drawing somewhere in there.  I did get footage like that last time, but in the interest of getting the video done ASAP, and YouTube’s dumb 10-minute rule, I didn’t include them.

When it comes to inking, all I have to say is that I hate drawing things twice.  It was even worse with Pariah because I disliked how much of the character of the original sketches got lost when it was inked; this is a complaint I’ve had about inking for years.  I think I’m going to go with a something a little less polished, something in pencil and colored pencil, perhaps.

And I’d like to potentially do a comedy this time.  I’ve been doing serious comics for… how long now?  Over two years.  I do believe something jigworthy and fun is in order.  I need more of that in my life.

This Saturday, around 10 in the morning, I intend to do a 24 Hour Comic.  This is kind of a big thing for me, since I’ve never exactly tried to push myself at time deadlines with a large number of pages.  Jigworthy strips usually took me around 3 hours to do apiece, and Garanos took 3 to 4.  It adds up quite a bit when you update three days a week, though I always thought the quality of the artwork was worth it.

I’ll probably be taking a different approach to these comics than my usual style, mainly the fact that I’ll probably be inking again.  GASP!  I know.  I haven’t inked anything, digital or otherwise, on a regular basis since 2004, other than a few individual pieces, and of course, Corner on Main.  Hell, I haven’t even colored with traditional media in even longer.

It will be an interesting exercise in going back to my roots.  Once upon a time, I hoarded skin-tone colored pencils and inking pens.  Now I… don’t.  Though the colored pencils have been rattling around in the bottom of my tacklebox for quite awhile.

In preparation for this weekend, I’ve been trying to clean up my apartment and get it looking very very tidy, so I’m not distracted by clutter.  When I’m faced with a looming, important deadline, it’s not uncommon for me to suddenly become very productive at cleaning and generally doing anything but what I should be doing.  This behavior works on many levels for me, since I’ve been easily distracted from getting this important cleaning done in the past few days, in favor of reading webcomics that I’ve been meaning to read.  (Though I did get my bedroom vacuumed!)  I’m frustratingly predictable sometimes, heh.

There’s also the matter of the website for these comics to be collected in.  I’ll probably have to hold off on actually building it until next week.

Time to retrieve the laundry.  I’ll probably post again tomorrow!  Good night.

Tsubasacon was last weekend, and I was in the Artist Alley! This is my second year at Tsubasa, and happens to be one of the cons where I know a good portion of the staff.

Sales were good, and fun was had. It was still somehow an exhausting weekend, for being a small (but mighty) convention.

Last week, I began my final quarter of school. In ten short weeks, I will be an alumnus of Ohio State. Finally, eh? It doesn’t seem like that long since I moved into Baker West, but then again, it does.

My big goal during this last quarter is to complete a 24 Hour Comic. I’ll be attempting this for the first time this weekend, so wish me luck. I’m hoping to host an actual event somewhere on campus on October 18^th, the official 24 Hour Comics Day, and I’ve got several classmates and acquaintances interested in participating. Time is growing short, so I’m hoping I can get this together along with juggling my school work.

Garanos is currently on hiatus, for several reasons, not the least of which is school. I’ve been feeling very burnt out lately, which I kind of blame on the repetitive nature of my activities over the summer. Go to the library, go to Starbucks, work on Garanos, maybe get a full night’s sleep, lather-rinse-repeat. I didn’t get any more work done on Corner on Main like I wanted to, which is really unfortunate. I’m thinking if I can manage it, I might at least try to sketch out the next story track I have in mind during this quarter. At least then, I’d have something tangible to have in the back of my mind.

Some of the comic burnout might also be because of the repetitive nature of my coloring routine for Garanos.  I’ve been stepping up the art in the last chapter, so much so that I’m spending a lot more time on smaller, sometimes inane details, and it got very tiresome after 20-odd pages and hundreds of hours of work.  I want to look into time-saving tricks to apply to my coloring style during this hiatus.

I’m also no longer at Starbucks. It’s strange to think that it might be my last service industry job. I don’t think I’ve had a proper concept of “the weekend” since junior high, before I started working in the first place. I’ll miss my coworkers, but working at a huge corporation like that does start to chip away at your soul little by little.  It’s nice to know I don’t have to look one more huffy teenager in the eye as they order their sugar-laden status symbol coffee drinks.

I wont even go into the fact that my last performance review contained the criticism that my customer service was “good, but not legendary.”

I love the library and I get to stay there for a quarter after I graduate, so I have until March to look for a big kid job.

Stay tuned for some Twittering and blogging this weekend as I take on the 24 Hour Comic.

I also went to Cleveland Colossal Convention and Matsuricon this summer, but since both are smaller cons with short summaries I didn’t think they merited their own separate posts, unlike Connecticon.

ColossalCon was a pretty okay con.  I was originally supposed to be the Artist Alley head for this con, but due to various incompetencies and miscommunication, it went to someone else.  Not that I’m bitter or anything.  I tried to make a last-ditch effort to get into the AA myself to sell, but alas, no dice on that either.  So I gophered instead.

I spent Friday manning the con’s green room, which was basically a consuite that wasn’t open to the public, only staff and guests.  It was probably the best place I could’ve been put, since I basically just had to straighten up abandoned plates and pop cans, add more soda to the coolers to chill, make sure people got fed, and watch TV as people filtered in and out.

I finally got some of Mike Thorn’s curry, after two missed chances at the last two APs, but it was well worth the wait, and the horrible burning sensation.  I even like spicy food, thanks to my conditioning working at Rice King, but this was even hotter than I expected.  But delicious.

I have to mention the cosplay simulcast as this point.  The con had a closed circuit TV channel in the hotel rooms that was playing anime all day, and was scheduled to air the cosplay simulcast on Friday night, since they had two cosplay events.  However, they couldn’t get the video feed up for whatever reason, so instead, Mike Thorn used his laptop to IM the computer that was hooked up to the CC channel… and narrated the cosplay via AIM.

I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a cosplay event more.  There were actually some minor tech issues with the CC channel during the simulcast (like the IM window being cutoff at the bottom, or the few minutes that the channel went dead) that I reported to Thorn via text message, so in a small way, I saved the simulcast.  Though Chris and I might’ve been the only ones actually watching.

Saturday, Chris and I went to a friend’s barbecue, so we weren’t at the con at all.  Fun was had, I learned how to play Reversi, and if it hadn’t rained I might’ve gone swimming in Lake Erie.  We also played Dungeon, a treasure-hunting board game from the 80s by the same company as Dungeons and Dragons.

Sunday we went back just to check in with people, and I got my gopher badge refunded, since apparently they were impressed that I was in the green room for 11 hours straight.  After that, it was back to Columbus!

A few weekends ago was Matsuricon, as well.  Matsuricon kind of blew last year.  It’s such a small con, and such a boring con that my sales were really really bad.  I think I just managed to break even late on Sunday last year.  However, my AA merchandise lineup has expanded considerably since last year, so I’m sure that had a lot to do with my much better sales.

A few days before the convention, I bought a used dolly to cart around my AA stuff since I knew I’d be packing and setting up mostly by myself over the weekend.  It had been chained to a sign across the street from my usual morning bus stop for about a week, with a sign saying it was for sale for ten bucks, and to go to such-and-such apartment to buy it.  A day would go by and I’d think, “Hmm, that would be really handy for Artist Alley stuff…”  Another day would go by and I’d think, “Hmm, it’s still there…”  Another day, “It’s still there…!!”  So on Thursday, I took a ten up to the owner and carted it back home, victorious.

My sister Kelly, and our friends from various parts of Ohio and Indiana, were also there, so I got lots of visitors throughout the weekend, and Chris even came out to sit with me for a good part of Saturday.  Kelly left her laptop with me at my table, so I at least got to play with the internet when I didn’t have people to talk to or draw for.

There was even a lovely bit of con drama to keep things interesting, involving some jerk tangentally related to our group and the Spike Spiegel cosplayer whose arm he broke.  Insert roll of eyes.  Some people are just ridiculously stupid.

All in all, Matsuricon wasn’t totally worthless this year.  I broke even early on Saturday, which is a marked improvement from 2007.  I’ll probably be there again next year, since it’s a fairly inexpensive con if I’m selling.